Xiluluke's Weekend Letter Vol. 04

Even When You Win, Find the Bad Move

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

— Socrates, in Plato's Apology (38a)

After a game of Go, there's a principle that goes "don't judge a move by the result." It means that even if you won, you still go looking for the bad moves along the way.

When players finish a game, they don't rush into the next one. They go back over their choices move by move and find the variations they missed at the time.

What's the logic underneath? A good result doesn't mean the process was right. That's what "don't judge a move by the result" means.

The same idea works really well in ordinary reviews. What we should care about isn't whether the result was good, but whether there were blind spots along the way.

These days, after every post goes out, I chat with AI and have it argue against my points to widen my view.

A simple example: sometimes I finish a piece, edit it, schedule it, and before I've even started reviewing it, a hole in the logic pops into my head.

What's a hole in the logic? To me, it's something I've been turning over in my head that even I can't figure out how to justify.

Last year I wrote a post called "How I Lost 5 kg in a Month: My Carb Cycling Fat Loss Experience."

The title sounds like clickbait, but it really was what happened. I really did lose 5 kg in a month with carb cycling.

But looking back, there were problems both in the writing and in how I actually did the carb cycling.

First, forget carb cycling for a second. Losing 5 kg in a month is wrong in itself. That's way too fast. Never mind how much of it was muscle; keep that up long enough and your body might start having problems.

I did end up 5 kg lighter, and my shape clearly changed. But looking back on that time, it really wasn't a scientific way to lose fat.

And an unscientific fat-loss experience produced an unscientific post about it.

While writing, I also overlooked some key issues.

To be clear, carb cycling for fat loss is definitely legit. There are plenty of real-world cases online to back it up. But I made some critical mistakes when I wrote about it.

For example, on low-carb days, since carbs are so low, you should eat relatively more fat. But in the post I wrote fat intake as 50 g for high, medium and low days alike.

A reader on a low-carb day following that 50 g of fat would end up with too big a calorie deficit, which could lead to binge eating or a slower metabolism.

Put those two things together and you can see that a good result often hides a bad process.

I lost 5 kg, but it came off fast, in a short time. I wrote a post that got over a thousand reads, but it had misleading numbers in it.

So now I stick to "don't judge a move by the result" and keep reviewing.

The key is that this kind of review doesn't just work for writing. It works for lots of other things in life too.

Looking back at the road you came by when you've won doesn't just help you find holes in the process. It also keeps you clear-headed, so a moment of success doesn't go to your head.

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For this week's lighter section, I want to start with my thoughts on this weekly letter itself.

This is my fourth issue. I started it with Fanfan's encouragement. A month has gone by now, but honestly, after a month of writing it, I'm still very much a beginner at this.

Fanfan told me about one way to do a weekly: gather the best things you read over the past week, edit them together, and that's an issue.

That way it pushes you to read and take in a lot, and the weekly also becomes a way to look back on your favorite things from the week.

But for now, I don't think that kind of weekly suits me.

First, input. I do take in some things over a week, but what counts as content that would make people go "wow"? I honestly can't say.

So for now, my take on the weekly is that it has to come down to my own writing.

Then how is writing a weekly different from writing a daily post?

I think the difference is that a daily post is written fresh that day, while a weekly should take a whole week of collecting, organizing and digesting material before writing.

To be honest, all four of my issues so far, this one included, were written on the day they went out, a few hours before posting.

In other words, I never spent a week on any of them, so of course they read thin.

What I need to do now isn't stop writing the weekly. I need to figure out what I could study every day, keep thinking about and gathering material for as I go, and then edit together on the last day of the week.

I thought it over and over, and finally realized it would have to be something like eating and drinking water. Eating and drinking water? Yes, really. I should be writing about the things that are as basic as eating and drinking.

Besides eating and drinking, what do I use and do every single day?

There is something. I think it's materialist dialectics and minimalism.

Since last year I've been living minimally, working to want less stuff and to find and follow what really matters to me.

And materialist dialectics has been in my head ever since high school. Every choice I make, including embracing minimalism, liking something, hating something, sticking with something or giving it up, rests on materialist dialectics.

Yep, that's it. Whatever else goes in, these two things belong in my weekly.

So starting next week, I'll probably change what the weekly covers.

I'll likely write about how I practiced and thought about minimalism over the week.

If all goes to plan, I'll split minimalism and materialist dialectics into two separate projects.

For materialist dialectics, over the last few days I've planned out a writing column. It's going to be a challenge for me.

No doubt it'll be my first paid content. The column is built on the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, and in it I'll break down what's inside the Selected Works.

I've only read the Selected Works four times, but it has shaped my life at every turn.

So I want to do this column, not to brag about how great it is, and not to sing the praises of Chairman Mao's genius. What I want is for people who read it to understand what materialist dialectics is actually about.

It's a methodology, and the most important thing about a methodology is applying it to your own life.

Most of the commentary online about the Selected Works is about helping readers understand what it says. What I want is to help readers learn to think the way the Selected Works does, and use it in real life.

If all goes to plan, next Sunday you should see:

• A recap of how I explored minimalist living over the coming week.
• A post breaking down the first piece in Volume One of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society."

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This Week's Picks:

We start reading with the goal of getting better, and end up reading just "to feel like we're getting better." Put bluntly, that's mental masturbation. You get absorbed in learning how to improve yourself, but you never actually do anything to improve.

— DAN KOE

Actually doing it is the key. There's a learning method called learning by teaching. Teaching what you've learned to someone else deepens your own learning, and the act of teaching is itself a way of doing.

My theory definitely has its flaws, so I encourage you to question it, study it, and eventually form your own view. I write to understand the world better, and to offer a signpost for you, who are exploring too. — DAN KOE

This passage from Dan gave me a lot of confidence to think through my column and actually do it.